Here is a near-ideal combination of opera, company and venue. First, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a work with several sizeable roles, but no dominant leading character (though the plot is driven by Oberon), so offers multiple opportunities for a group of young singers. All opera needs teamwork, but here the interaction between characters – increasingly muddled as they become – is crucial. Second, the Silk Street Theatre is an ideal size for the work, its steep rake and deep pit in which hide the instrumentalists, affords a remarkably close connection for every spectator with the dramatic action, whether tense, comic or tender. The acoustic is generous, and the orchestra under Dominic Wheeler did full justice to Britten’s brilliantly colourful and haunting score right from those first eerie glissandi.
Britten’s opera rewards a production like this fine one from Martin Lloyd-Evans that does all that is asked and adds some imaginative detail. The woodland scenes are played on an ellipse of light, attached by taut ropes to a similar smaller ellipse high above, reminiscent of an abstract sculpture, the magic of geometry representing that of a nocturnal fairy kingdom. A large shallow bowl-shaped chair (throne?) stands in for the flowery bank on which the fairy monarchs recline. The lighting and occasional video work is excellent, the background a deep forest of hanging light-bulbs, variously lit at different moments, one even becoming the bee whose honey-bag Bottom instructs Cobweb to seize. A moon progresses across stage, and there is a sense of always being surrounded by the dark, from which characters emerge through those taut ropes as if through a copse. It is, as this of all operas requires, enchanting.
The spirits who inhabit this woodland realm are garbed as contemporary goths, dark and edgy with a hint of menace. There are some Elizabethan touches in ruffs for the chorus and farthingales (without skirts) for the monarchs. William Sharma’s Puck amusingly resembles his masters in all this, but his large naked belly inhibits his mobility; he can barely emerge from a trapdoor let alone “put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes”. The little changeling boy is a (large) 1950’s schoolboy, cowed and frightened, perhaps by years of abuse – if so, it was the only hint of a production ‘agenda’ all evening. The lovers’ costumes are more contemporary, though they dispensed with any outerwear in their Act 2 dispute. Theseus and Hippolyta are more 20th-century regal, their palace indicated by a giant empty picture frame and some imposing seating. Add the rustics’ changing space and props and there is a cluttered final stage picture, rather reducing the impact of the closing chorus of the fairies. They were not the stipulated boys’ chorus but an adult group, which although it impairs Britten’s scrupulously stratified sound world for the Dream, gives Tytania a more substantial-looking group of courtiers, often jerking their heads like timid animals, than the diminutive acolytes the Fairy Queen usually commands.